Producing music is an incredibly creative process, and knowing the tools of the trade is essential in order to transmit the musical ideas in your head into the DAW in a creative and uninhibited way. Whether you have used a computer to create music before, or you have been curious about production for years, this 4-week course will give you an introductory look into the world of Avid Pro Tools and Pro Tools First.

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Chrissy Tignor-Fisher

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[SOUND] Now that we've added our EQ and compression it's time to do reverb. Reverb is used to recreate a space or listening environment for your mix to be in. It's really important that you create one consistent listening environment for your entire mix in order for everything to blend together naturally and be nicer for the listener to hear. In order to do this and keep your listening environment consistent, we're going to create one, ambient reverb or one room for you to be listening in for your mix. Because we've already been working on Amy's vocal, I'm going to start there. And when we create a reverb, it's a little bit different than how we created EQ and how we added compression. We're going to use a bus and what's called an aux track to add the reverb. So let me show you how to do it. Bring up your mix window. And below your inserts A through E that we added in the template, you're going to see sends A through E. And the sends area is where we add the bus for our reverb again, if you don't see that, you can always change your view options in the bottom left corner of your mix window. Make sure you see sends A through E. We're going to add buses for a reverb because it will basically send a duplicate signal of each sound we want to send to the reverb to one single place or reverb sound that we like. This will keep the listening environment consistent and make our mix sound much better. In the first slot of your sends A through E, click and choose, new track. This will create the bus that we want for the reverb and create the aux track I talked about, where we're going to put our reverb effect. This new track window has the option of choosing mono or stereo, and since reverb is to create a listening space, we want to use both left and right, just like our ears, so a stereo aux track is what we want. For the name, I want you to call it reverb. [MUSIC]. After this happened, you're going to see that it created a new track next to the lead vocal track that I wanted to add reverb to. Option or Alt click to deselect the two. And click and drag your reverb aux track all the way to the end next to the master fader. Another mini fader also pops up. And that is our bus. The fader controls how much reverb we're going to have on our individual track. By turning it up and down. [MUSIC] I'm going to option or Alt click on the fader to bring it all the way up to zero for this demonstration. Because we created a new track in our sends section, it's actually labeled this send reverb. If you click on the reverb send, you can bring up your fader at all times. On our aux track, the input is also set to that same reverb bus, which means this signal is coming from my lead vocal track into this reverb aux track. [MUSIC] It's important when you add the reverb affect that you don't do it in the inserts area on every individual track, for that consistency I talked about. So instead of doing it on every track individually, we're going to add it in the inserts section on the aux track. [MUSIC] Choose reverb, D-verb. Reverb D-verb, reverb D-verb. It's important for every aux track that we create, that we do something called solo safe. Solo safe will solo the aux track whenever you solo another track that's connected to it. In other words, if I solo my lead vocal, I do want to hear the reverb I've added to it. So, I don't want to have to always travel over, and solo the reverb as well. In order to solo safe the aux track, you want to command click on a Mac, or control click on a PC, on the solo button. [MUSIC] If you have the vocal soloed, your bus turned all the way up, and the reverb added to the aux track you should be able to hear the reverb effect added. [MUSIC] And you can hear that happening. Now with the reverb we don't necessarily want a sound that that's large or maybe we want something even bigger. Digital reverbs give us options of different listening environments to use. The reason we have so many options in deverb for different spaces because this is what's called a digital reverb which is essentially mapped out some of the reflective properties of certain spaces, to recreate them in a digital environment. So when I choose a hall reverb, it's actually taking the reflective properties of a hall and adding it to our mix to make it sound more realistic. So this setting is actually set at a large hall reverb. And the decay, or sometimes it's called reverb time, is how long that reverberation lasts. So this one set to 4.5 seconds. If we make that a little bit shorter the reverb won't sound as big. [MUSIC] And, how ever you change that is going to make the reverb more intense or less intense. As a good rule any reverb that's over two seconds can tend to be a little bit overwhelming for your mix, so try to keep it small but also get a sound that you'll like at the same time. Experiment with different sounds, like churches are going to have longer reverb times or decays, plates which have shorter reverb times or decays, or other rooms, or other ambient reverb effects. Mess around with this and find something that you like that's going to work for your whole mix. [MUSIC] For this particular song, I'm going to use a hall reverb. Set it about 1.6 seconds of reverb time. [MUSIC] That's going to give the effect of my mix being in a specific room, but it's not going to be overwhelming, by reverberating some frequencies too long or too much. Ambient reverbs are for sending most of your instruments to, however you should never send a kick drum or a bass to your reverb. Because a reverb is basically a reverberation of each frequency, sending low frequency instruments is going to make your mix sound really muddy and really undefined. So make sure that you don't send kick or bass there. However you can send any of your other instruments to this reverb and experiment with how it sounds. To make it easier to control the amount of reverb you are sending to each instrument, hold down command on a Mac or control on a PC and click on the small arrow next to the reverb bust that you have created. That will create a miniature fader so you don't have to keep clicking on the bust to bring it up. Now we can control how much reverb we add to Amy's voice, and add reverb to any other instruments that we want. Once you've created the bus, you can copy that busy on to the other instruments you also want to add to the reverb by option, click, and dragging on a Mac, or alt click and drag on a PC. So I'm holding down option clicking on the reverb send and dragging it onto the other instruments that I want. And you can do this for any instruments you want to send to the reverb. So because I just clicked and dragged it onto my snaps track. [MUSIC] Each of these faders is going to control individually how much reverb you have on each sound, but it's all going to the same room. So it's keeping it consistent for the listener and making your mix sound better. Keep using option, click, drag to add reverb to each one of the instruments that you want. And most of the time that's going to be everything except of kick an bass. [MUSIC] If you use the option, click, drag, and the panning of your bus suddenly turns to the left or the right, hold option again or Alt again and click on the pan pod to make sure that your reverb send is always going down the middle. [MUSIC] Now we can control each one of these levels of reverb for each instrument individually. And be careful not to add too much. You want your mix to sound natural, but not overwhelmed by the reverbs sound. [MUSIC] And now we have everything in the same space. And if we decide that we suddenly want to change that space, all we have to do is open D-verb on the aux track and change it to something different. If you want to experiment more with different types of reverb, try adding a plate reverb just to your snare and to your vocals. If you want to learn some more about different types of reverb and get into more detail, check out the reverb reading for this lesson. [MUSIC]